I watched the start of a YouTube playthrough for The Witcher a few weeks back. It looked daunting then. (But I'm braver now.)

I'm on my second play through Skyrim. On my first run I was a Level 57 Warrior specialising in two-handed battleaxe. Towards the end I was also dabbling in archery and one-handed. I made my own dragonplate armour with a final armour rating of 790! (I ranked up on Alchemy, Enchanting and Smithing until I popped.)

Mad, I think I remember that you have to choose from your screen which shout you want to have active. So it will always be the "z" key. You choose that at the same screen that you choose your magic spell, etc. Of course, with my memory, I could easily be wrong. The good thing is other members have much better memories and will correct me if I'm wrong.

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"Dogs are not our whole life, but they make our lives whole." -Roger Caras

One of the tabs on the spell screen (go to your inventory, then it left-alt, to go there) is for shouts. As you come across new words in the world, you can use R to spend dragon souls to learn the new words. Shouts can also be favourited, so that they show up in the Q menu too.

Skyrim is fresh in my mind just now as I'm currently working my way through it for the first time: level 48 Nord fighter/wizard, that sneaks around in awesome dragonbone armour, and can crack locks as soon as look at them (And I love the effect when you score a sneaky critical with a bow and arrow and one-hit a bad guy... eat your heart out Robin Hood)

eta: it seems that no matter how long I've been responding to posts on forums like GB, I fail to notice that other people have responded before me (usually on the next page) with exactly the same info!